I want one!
Made for Ikea’s Space10, this is the Growroom, specifically made for cities, it can grow a communities worth of food and herbs. I’m not urban, but I still want one. The best news? Space10 and architects Sine Lindholm and Mads-Ulrik Husum have open sourced this, so anyone can make one.
Installation view, PARADISE COVE 1.0, 2015.
At its best, Hawai’i’s art community reflects a multi-ethnic heritage as well as a critical desire to confront the legacy of colonialism that plays out in the present day against the people, land, and natural resources of the islands. For many long-time Hawai’i artists, there is an acceptance of a place where the market is not a priority. This is important work, hard work, work that must be done in the face of personal and economic sacrifice and the growing lack of institutional support, despite near-constant development and a booming tourist economy.
At its worst, Hawai’i’s art community is dated and alienating: full of the racist undertones and an underlying bitterness stemming from a lack of opportunities. Artists here can be unapologetically territorial. “Watufaka!” Given the whitewashed colonial injustices committed against Hawai’ians and throughout the Pacific, does it really come as a surprise? Meanwhile, artists trying to make a living face tremendous pressure to conform to touristic expectations and often end up sacrificing their vision to produce uninspired tropical seascapes or “designed by committee” public commissions for the state. Neither promotes meaningful engagement. Some artists go for broke and move to “the mainland,” never to be seen or heard from again. Some move home to surf or start a career, when they are jaded and tired, in their 40s. The rest just stop.
The whole essay, part of 50 States of Art, is at The Creators Project, and excellent reading. There’s more to see, too!
Can’t sleep, so getting a start on Rendered Harmless, got a whole lot of bible rolling to do.
© C. Ford.
Batwoman returns as part of DC’s Rebirth event.
Kate Kane, a.k.a. lesbian superhero Batwoman, is back! Part of DC Comics’ Rebirth event, Batwoman: Rebirth quickly gets new readers up to speed. The first issue in the series is available in comics stores and at Comixology today. When Batwoman debuted in 2011, she became the first LGBT character to star in an ongoing monthly comic book from a mainstream publisher. Marguerite Bennett (DC Comics Bombshells,Batgirl,Earth 2: World’s End) will be writing the new adventures of the heroine, with art by Steve Epting.
“There has never been a heroine I have loved more than Batwoman,” Bennett says. “Her flaws, her ferocity, her struggle to rise above her own history and find a way to serve the greater good and those she loves — she’s always cut me straight to the bone. To be a queer woman and to see a queer woman as not just a part but a pillar of the Bat family was life-changing, inspiring, and gave me the courage to pursue this career in comics. The opportunity to add to Kate Kane’s story and legacy is both an honor and a sincere dream come true.”
You can see much more at The Advocate.
MISSION STATEMENT.
We are a global coalition affirming the radical nature of art. We believe that art can help counter the rising rhetoric of right-wing populism, fascism and the increasingly stark expressions of xenophobia, racism, sexism, homophobia and unapologetic intolerance.We know that freedom is never granted – it is won. Justice is never given – it is exacted. Both must be fought for and protected, yet their promise has seldom been so fragile, so close to slipping from our grasp, as at this moment.
As artists, it is our job and our duty to reimagine and reinvent social relations threatened by right-wing populist rule. It is our responsibility to stand together in solidarity. We will not go quietly. It is our role and our opportunity, using our own particular forms, private and public spaces, to engage people in thinking together and debating ideas, with clarity, openness and resilience.
OUR PROJECT.
A series of contemporary art exhibitions and actions that confront, head on, the rise of right-wing populism in the US, Europe and elsewhere. Exhibitions featuring critically engaged contemporary artists and taking place in central art institutions as well as alternative spaces, that will bring into public view statements, questions and reflections on the state we are in. To do what art has always endeavored: to help envision and shape the world in which we want to live.Proceeds will go to arts & activist causes and building the coalition.
© C. Ford.
With added bonus of play time, courtesy of Marcus, who sends the best goodies ever. Hydrophilic polymer beads, orange oil, water, and really excellent glassware! I don’t know if the sun will cooperate, it’s sunny and remarkably warm today, but it’s supposed to be snowing by Odin’s day. Oh, where’s the virtue in patience? Off to play!
A still from Arke’s 1996 video Arctic Hysteria shows the artist naked and crawling across a photograph of Nuugaarsuk Point in Greenland. Photo courtesy of the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art. Acquired with funding from Anker Fonden Poul Buchard/Brøndum & Co.
Most people have never heard of Pia Arke, which is a shame, because she was an artist who took on one huge subject: the colonial takeover of indigenous peoples by those who termed themselves “explorers” and “discoverers”. There’s a great deal of horror inherent in any indigenous peoples experiences with colonialism. Unsurprisingly, indigenous women got the worst of it.
In the spring of 1995, Danish-Greenlandic artist Pia Arke was digging through the archives of New York City’s Explorers Club. She was searching for maps, ethnographic images, and scientific miscellany that she could repurpose into collages that confront Greenland’s colonial past. Arke knew early 20th-century adventurers often, by turns, demeaned and romanticized her Inuit ancestors. Even so, one photo from American explorer Robert E. Peary’s collection shocked her: a native woman, topless and screaming, restrained by two fur-clad and seemingly untroubled white men. A curator told Arke the woman could have been suffering from a madness called Arctic hysteria.
More than 20 years later, Arke’s mesmerizing film Arctic Hysteria, which she created the year after she found that dark photo, was looping endlessly in an alcove at Denmark’s Louisiana Museum of Modern Art. Situated in a small town along the Baltic Sea about 50 kilometers north of Copenhagen, the Louisiana Museum enjoys the kind of international acclaim that makes it a dream exhibit space for most artists. Arke’s work was part of last year’s star-studded exhibit Illumination, which featured such luminaries as Ai Weiwei, Cindy Sherman, Jeff Wall, and Gerhard Richter. The flashiest Arke piece on display was Legende I-V, a series of five collages of Greenlandic maps and sepia-toned family snapshots layered with imported commodities such as rice, sugar, and coffee. Legende I-V is physically imposing—it dominated an entire gallery wall—and hauntingly beautiful. The foodstuffs function both symbolically and texturally, the photographs evoke the warmth of kinship, and the cartographic lines of Greenland, stamped with place names referencing colonial explorers (Peary Land, Humboldt Glacier, and Kane Bassin, for example), loom insistently over everyone.
Arke’s Arctic Hysteria is equally magnetic. The performance, which lasts six minutes, is silent and consists almost entirely of one scene: Arke crawling naked across a giant black-and-white photo of Nuugaarsuk Point, a spit of land at the terminus of a C-shaped bay. The artist lived there, outside the small town of Narsaq, Greenland, with her parents and siblings in the late 1960s. In the video, Arke strokes the artificial landscape, rolls across it, and sniffs it like an animal. Then she methodically rips the entire thing to shreds, gathers the curled shards of paper, and lets them fall across her shoulders and thighs. The intimacy of the performance and the title’s historical allusion are classic Arke.
[…]
Historical context points to alternative interpretations. Inuit women labored at the very bottom of the social hierarchy on Peary’s expeditions and in his camps, expected to sew, fish, carry wood, and submit to the Americans’ sexual desires. Peary, for example, fathered two sons with his Inuit laundress, Ahlikasingwah. His navigator, Robert Bartlett, viewed one woman’s hysteria as simple protest, or “pure cussedness.” Accounts described women who seemed intent on escape or dissent leaping over the ship’s railings or shouting for a knife. Expedition member Donald MacMillan recounted finding a woman named Inawaho naked and screaming, presumably unaware of her surroundings and out of her mind. But as soon as MacMillan pulled out his camera, Inawaho hurled huge chunks of ice at him and later begged him to destroy the photos. Were these women, in fact, crazy? Or were they reacting perfectly rationally—even bravely—to their circumstances?
© C. Ford.
The time of stench is now over, thankfully. So, I had a bit of time to play. Years ago, I wanted to experiment a bit. The experiment didn’t work out, but the paint was so beautiful. I found out then that I could peel it off the baking parchment paper I had used. I still have a number of those pieces. Watching paint dry might not be fun, but peeling it is. Have fun with acrylic paints (I suggest using baking parchment or the ever trusty freezer paper), let them surface dry, or as long as you want, then peel. Purty paint to play with results. This is also one way that paint doesn’t need to go to waste. Even very thin layers will peel, but the thicker your layer of paint, the easier the peel.
• February 16, 2017.
Gilles Cenazandotti Polar Bear, 2016.
Fusing a story of sustainability and animal welfare, the chromatic and playful sculptures fabricated from found objects ponder the future of the environment. Each of Gilles Cenazandotti‘s sculptures and assemblages are composed of polyurethane material culled from the Mediterranean Sea. The style of sauvegarde art, or safeguarding, is a unique environmental method that draws upon the French artist’s love for the environment and his love for forming art from unconventional materials. Formerly the head of a design company, the artist quit his day-job and sold the company four years ago in order to create detritus-amassed art.
Gilles Cenazandotti Black Panther.
“I imagine this universe in my sculptures, of the cities moving to what is necessary to the survival of the men. What will it occur when the tide will overflow of our rejected products? When will pollution touch so many species that life will be decreased? This science fiction is near where one already sees the animals changing territory. One can wonder what they will become, like so many already disappeared species, if they do not find any more spaces to live.”
Gilles Cenazandotti Baboon, 2015.
Gilles Cenazandotti, Briquets Triptych , 2016. 47.25 x 11 inches each. Lighters Found from the Sea on Altuglass.
Remarkable work, and work with a very strong message. We need to stop being unthinking apes and be mindful humans. All of the work is deeply poignant, but it’s the lighters that get to me. FFS, is it that much to expect people to not treat our oceans like a convenient trash can?
Gilles Cenazandotti at Contessa Gallery.
Via The Creators Project.
© C. Ford.
Oh man, it’s amazing that you can manage to forget the godsawful stench of gesso in between uses. If anything can turn you off doing art work, it’s that fuckin’ goop. Ugheeesh. (Yes, I messed with the photo, it doesn’t actually look like that, just smells like that.) What does it smell like? Rotten horseradish soaked in formaldehyde and pissed on by cats for 6 months. Ugh.
Escargots. Jacques Collin de Plancy – Dictionnaire infernal.
I’m being much too distracted by the Dictionnaire Infernal right now. How did I not know about the Snail Telegraph? The original text from Dictionnaire Infernal:
Escargots. On ne voit nulle part que ces honnêtes créatures aient jamais figuré au sabbat. Mais il paraît qu’elles ont aussi leur côté mystérieux, et qu’elles pourraient, quand les études dont s’occupent les savants auront abouti, faire concurrence au télégraphe électrique. On a donc proposé en 1850 un procédé qui se mûrit, c’est la boussole pasilalinique-sympathique. Si vous trouvez ce nom bizarre, l’agent de cette boussole ne l’est pas moins ; c’est l’escargot. Deux amis séparés par de grandes distances se seront munis chacun d’un escargot de même espèce, les auront magnétisés ensemble pour établir la sympathie ; puis l’ami resté à Paris chargera son escargots des nouvelles qu’il veut transmettre à son ami installé à Pékin, et ce dernier répondra de la même manière ; par quels moyens faciles ? nous l’ignorons ; mais en mars de la présente année, les journaux disaient qu’on était à la veille de résultats satisfaisants, et les spiriles affirment que cette découverte se rattache à ce que nos pères appelaient la magie naturelle. Un Américain prétend même que les escargots magnétisés parleront, ou bien un esprit, de ceux qui tiennent aux tables, pourra parler pour eux.
